Palo Alto University (PAU) is launching the Center for Translational Research in Behavioral Science, a new university-wide hub that will bring together faculty, students, researchers, community partners, healthcare organizations, industry, and other collaborators to address complex challenges affecting people and communities.
The launch marks a significant step in PAU's next chapter as the University enters its sixth decade with a new vision: A future shaped by human understanding. Building on its expertise in psychology, counseling, social work, and mental health, PAU is expanding its research capabilities and creating new opportunities to apply behavioral science to some of society's most pressing challenges.
Research in behavioral science helps us understand how people think, learn, behave, and connect. Translational research helps move knowledge beyond academic publications and into settings where it can improve practice, inform policy, strengthen communities, shape technology, and contribute to better human outcomes.
The Center will serve as an interdisciplinary home for this work at PAU, supporting research from early-stage ideas through external funding, collaboration, implementation, dissemination, and real-world application.
Its work will include developing signature research initiatives; expanding grant and sponsored-research activity; supporting faculty and student researchers; strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration; and building partnerships with universities, healthcare organizations, government, foundations, community organizations, startups, and industry.
As emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, reshape how people live and work, understanding their effects on human behavior is increasingly important.
Located in Silicon Valley, PAU has an opportunity to bring its behavioral science expertise into conversations about how technology is developed, implemented and used.
A signature focus of the Center will be research at the intersection of human understanding and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. Through research and strategic partnerships, PAU aims to contribute a distinctly behavioral-science perspective to conversations about how technology affects the ways people think, learn, work, connect, make decisions, and experience the world.
The Center will also expand opportunities for partnerships with startups, accelerators, healthcare organizations, technology companies, and other innovators interested in applying behavioral science to real-world challenges and human-centered innovation.
The Center will strengthen the infrastructure that enables research and innovation across PAU. In addition to cultivating new research initiatives and partnerships, it will connect and support research-related functions, including grants, the Institutional Review Board, research design and data analysis services, writing support, and library resources.
Faculty from across the University will have opportunities to participate as Center affiliates, collaborators, and research leaders, while students will gain additional opportunities to develop research skills and contribute to work with meaningful societal impact.
The Center will also help researchers identify external funding, form interdisciplinary teams, develop competitive proposals, and explore pathways for translating discoveries through partnerships, intellectual property, licensing, and commercialization.
PAU is now launching a national search for the Founding Executive Director of the Center for Translational Research in Behavioral Science.
The Founding Executive Director will have the opportunity to build the Center from the ground up, developing its strategy, signature initiatives, partnerships, research portfolio, and long-term model for impact and sustainability.
PAU is seeking an entrepreneurial scholar-leader who understands the academic research enterprise while also seeing possibilities beyond traditional boundaries: someone who can connect researchers with funders, communities, healthcare organizations, government, foundations, and industry and create new pathways through which behavioral science can make a measurable difference.
As PAU enters its next 50 years, the Center for Translational Research in Behavioral Science reflects an ambitious commitment: to move human understanding into action, and ensure that behavioral science helps shape solutions to some of the most consequential challenges of our time.